I said nice things back to him, like, “Uh-huh. That’s fine. I’m glad to hear it.” Sam was watching me, grinning from ear to ear.
The guy’s voice dropped a note lower, as if he was afraid he’d be overheard. “It’s so much pleasanter dealing with you than that Mr. Gunn,” he said. “He’s so excitable!”
“Well, I’m the president of the firm,” I said back to him, while Sam held both hands over his mouth to stifle his guffaws. “Whenever a problem arises, feel free to call me.”
He thanked me three dozen times.
I no sooner had put the phone down than it rang again. Pierre D’Argent, calling from Rockledge headquarters in Pennsylvania.
In a smarmy, oily voice he professed shock and surprise that anyone would think that Rockledge was trying to sabotage a smaller competitor. I motioned for Sam to pick up his phone and listen in.
“We would never stoop to anything like that,” he assured me. “There’s no need for anyone to get hysterical.”
“Well,” I said, “it seemed strange to us that Rockledge placed such a large order with the outfit that’s making our teeny little coils, and then tried to muscle them into shunting our work aside.”
“We never did that,” D’Argent replied, like a saint accused of rifling the poor-box. “It’s all a misunderstanding.”
Sam said sweetly into his phone, “We’ve subpoenaed their records, oh silver-tongued devil.”
“What? Who is that? Gunn, is that you?”
“See you in Leavenworth, Pee-air.”
D’Argent hung up so hard I thought a gun had gone off in my ear. Sam fell off his chair laughing and rolled on the floor, holding his middle and kicking his feet in the air. We had not subpoenaed anybody for anything, but it cost Rockledge a week’s worth of extremely expensive legal staff work to find that out.
Anyway, that had happened months earlier, and now the superconducting coils had finally arrived at the Cape and Sam had to buzz over there to inspect them. Leaving Bonnie Jo and me alone in the office. Friday afternoon. The weekend looming.
I did my level best to avoid her. She was staying at the Marriott hotel in Titusville, so I steered clear of the whole town. Kept to myself in my little rattrap of a one-room apartment. Worked on my laptop all day Saturday, ate a microwaved dinner, watched TV. Then worked some more. Did not phone her, although I thought about it now and then. Maybe once every other minute.
Sunday it rained hard. I started to feel like a convict in prison. By noontime I had convinced myself that there was work to do in the office; anything to get out of my room. It was pouring so thick I got soaked running from my parking space to the covered stairs that led up to our office. First thing I did there was phone Sam’s hotel down at the Cape. Checked out. Then I phoned his apartment. Not there.
I slid into my desk chair, squishing wet. Okay. He’s back from the Cape. He’s with Bonnie Jo. Good. I guess.
But I guessed wrong, because Bonnie Jo came into the office, brighter than sunshine in a bright yellow slicker and plastic rain hat.
“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“Where’s Sam?” I asked her.
She peeled off the hat and slicker. “I thought he’d be here. Probably he stayed at the Cape for the weekend.”
“Yeah. He’s got a lot of old buddies at the Cape.”
“And girlfriends?”
“Uh, no. Not really.” I was never much good at shading the truth.
Bonnie Jo sat at her desk and picked up the phone. “Highway Patrol,” she said to the dialing assistance computer program.
She saw my eyebrows hike up.
“On a stormy day like this, maybe he drove off the road.”
The Highway Patrol had no accidents to report between where we were and the Cape. I puffed out a little sigh of relief. Bonnie Jo put the phone down with a bit of a dark frown on her pretty face.
“You worry about Sam that much?” I asked her.
“My job is to protect my daddy’s investment,” she said. “And my own.”
Well, one thing led to another and before I knew it we were having dinner together in the Japanese restaurant down at the end of the mall. I had to teach Bonnie Jo how to use chopsticks. She caught on real fast. Quick learner.
“Are you two engaged, or what?” I heard myself ask her.
She smiled, kind of sad, almost. “It depends on who you ask. My father considers us engaged, although Sam has never actually popped the question to me.”
“And what do you think?”
Her eyes went distant. “Sam is going to be a very rich man someday. He has the energy and drive and willingness to swim against the tide, and that will make him a multimillionaire eventually. If somebody doesn’t strangle him first.”
“So that makes him a good marriage prospect.”
Her unhappy little smile came back. “Sam will make a terrible husband. He’s a womanizer who doesn’t give a thought to anybody but himself. He’s lots of fun to be with, but he’d be hell to be married to.”
“Then why… ?”
“I already told you. To protect my daddy’s investment.”
“You’d marry him? For that?”
“Why not? He’ll have his flings, I’ll have mine. As long as I can present my daddy with a grandson, everyone will be satisfied.”
“But… love. What about love?”
Her smile turned bitter. “You mean like Melinda and Larry? That’s for the peasants. In my family marriage is a business proposition.”
I dropped the chunk of sushi in my chopsticks right into my lap.
Bonnie Jo leaned across the little table. “You’re really a very romantic guy, aren’t you, Spence? Have I shocked you?”
“Uh, no, not… well, I guess I never met a woman with your outlook on life.”
“Never dated an MBA before?” Her eyes sparkled with amusement now. She was teasing me.
“Can’t say that I have.”
She leaned closer. “Sam’s out at the Cape chasing cocktail waitresses and barmaids. Maybe I ought to go to a bar and see what I can pick up.”
“Maybe you ought to go home before you pick up something that’ll increase your father’s health insurance premiums,” I said, suddenly feeling sore at her.
She gave me a long look. “Maybe I should, at that.”
And that was our dinner together. I never touched her. I never told Sam about it. But the next morning when he showed up at the office looking like every blue Monday morning in the history of the world—bleary-eyed, pasty-faced, muttering about vitamin E—I knew I couldn’t hang around there with Bonnie Jo so close.
Melinda and Larry arrived hand in hand. I swear his stuttering had cleared up almost entirely in just that one weekend. Bonnie Jo came in around ten, took a silent look at Sam, and went to her desk as cool as liquid nitrogen. Sam was inhaling coffee and orange juice in roughly equal quantities.
“Sam,” I said, my voice so loud that it startled me, “since I’m president of this outfit, I’ve just made an executive decision.”
He looked over toward me with bloodshot eyes.
“I’m going over to the Cape,” I announced.
“I was just there,” he croaked.
“I mean to stay. Hardware’s starting to arrive. We need somebody to direct the assembly technicians, somebody there on the scene all the time, not just once a week. Somebody with the power to make decisions.”
“The techs know what they’re doing.better than you do, Mutt,” argued Sam. “If they run into any problems they’ve got phones, e-mail, faxes—they can even use the agency’s video link if they have to.”
“It’ll be better if I’m on the scene,” I insisted, trying not to look at Bonnie Jo. “We can settle questions before they become problems.”
Sam shook his head stubbornly. “We haven’t budgeted for you to be living in a hotel at the Cape. You know how tight everything is.”